I met John Haines in his painting studio in the Noonan Building during Open Studios in October. My return visit for this interview to his blacksmith shop next door, however, involved tip-toeing over broken glass and industrial debris, my path lit only be the glow of my blackberry. Eventually, I made my way into Haines' shop, where I recieved a brief introduction to blacksmithing. Talking about different flame temperatures and the black body properties of the forge reminded me of physics and chemistry class, illuminated in a new context.

Born upstate New York, John Haines' family moved to Texas before settling in Northern California. Having always enjoyed drawing, Haines traces both his creative and technical talents to his parents:

"My father is an engineer - his degree is in flow dynamics, which is actually all that stuff about heating and cooling [....] but he also used to build boats, sailboats. [... My mom] was very crafty, so I think a lot of the making things and the spark came from her"

Growing up in Palo Alto, Haines recalls seeing contemporary paintings, like Jackson Pollock's "Lucifer", in the homes of classmates, some of whom had avid art collector parents. But Haines' knowledge of the art world was still limited and he did not yet see himself in it:

"By the end of high school [...] I had no idea what I wanted to do. I thought about sailing or illustrating. I loved drawing. I had no idea what to do about it"

After a year at a junior college, Haines went to Los Angeles with a friend whose godfather happened to be the abstract expressionist painter Sam Francis. Haines spent a summer fixing a boat owned by Francis and Frank Gehry. As Francis' assistant, Haines was then able to start attending Otis Art Institute, which represented an edgier art school scene in Southern California:

"Sculpture was dead, cause this was '82. Painting was the big deal, so the painting studios were just jammed and I couldn't handle it. So, I started doing sculpture cause the sculpture garden was just empty - it had a big outdoor beautiful sculpture garden [...] I started working with metal out there. I had no idea what I was doing and I remember the tech telling me back then, 'Oh, you should check out blacksmithing'"

Without really knowing it, Haines began using basic blacksmithing in the process of building other sculptures:

"I would go down to the train yards and I would pick up pieces of metal and create these works. As I was working I realized that I needed connecting pieces that weren't the shape that I had found, so I started to manufacture [them]"

After graduating, Haines spent about a year traveling in Europe, doing a lot of drawing:

"Most of the artists I knew of had done time in Europe and there was all the background around that and I just had to go"

When he returned to the states, Haines stayed with friends in Santa Cruz and carved out a business making stretcher bars for customers on the Peninsula and painting and drawing in the evenings. Most of his time, however, was spent carving stone at Cabrillo College:

"I loved that subtractive quality. The carving is just the amazing thing. I can go either way - I can go subtractive or additive. Right now, it's kind of hard to do both because they're both incredibly time consuming."

There was a metal shop next to the stone carving yard, so Haines continued to dabble in metal and developed a collection of hand tools. But the Loma Prieta earthquake literally shook Haines out of complacency:

"That was the last day I ever did stone carving. Not because of trauma, but because that was the end of an era [since] the school closed down for a while [...] I never to even got to finish the sculpture [I was working on that day], so that was this traumatic end to a beautiful period"

In the aftershocks of Loma Prieta, Haines left Santa Cruz and ran Sam Francis' studio in Palo Alto for a few years before going back to Europe, this time more settled in Florence. His lengthier stay in Italy is reflected in his interest in the transavanguardistMimmo Paladino's assemblage on painting. With limited space, however, Haines mostly worked and painted, but he was able to begin exploring some combined metalwork and painting:

"I did a little bit of bronze casting [...] for the beginning of the hybrid pieces. They were bronze plaques that fit in the middle of paintings"

As Italy faced serious economic challenges, Haines returned to the Bay Area in 1996 and ended up in Santa Rosa. Looking for work, Haines took a job at Waylan Smithy, a blacksmith shop in west Petaluma on a farm with twenty-five years of soot on the floor. Run by master blacksmith, Toby Hickman, the shop was true to the industrial heritage of blacksmithing:

"I came in one morning and he came up to my face and yelled at me. He goes: 'Why are you here?!?' and I said, 'Cause I love metal' and he goes 'That's the only right answer!' and he just turned around and goes, '8 o'clock tomorrow!' and he left!"

While at Waylan, a project for the San Francisco restaurant, Boulevard, introduced Haines to Art Nouveau and Victor Horta. When Hickman sold his business, Haines worked with a colleague from the shop for a while, but moved to San Francisco after he was able to secure his current workshop at Pier 70.

"I started doing the hybrid pieces in Santa Rosa, just kind of touching on them. I started doing some larger paintings with metal in the middle [... Hanging sculpture on the wall] makes it a little more accessible for people [...] There are very few people who actually have pedestals in their home"

When he had to move to a smaller painting studio, Haines began gravitating more towards his metal work, with which he can also maintain a commercial practice. But his lifelong passion for drawing continues to drive his sculptural conceptions and his unique combinations of painting and metal:

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

This week, Arteaser takes a slightly different turn, looking at the art-inspired clothing of Joui Turandot. Each of Turandot's collections of one-of-a-kind apparel take inspiration from a different fellow artist.

If creativity were genetic, Joui Turandot's chromosomes would probably have the relevant combination. A native of Sacramento, Turandot's grandfather, Jean Varda, was a collage artist in Sausalito, while her grandmother had a degree in fashion design and became an abstract painter and art therapist:

"[My grandmother] had always lots of paints around because that was her job. She'd always set me up with an easel and I'd just be painting away or drawing or whatever. She was very encouraging of my artistic expression"

Turandot's creative instincts did not stop with painting and drawing. With the support of her family, Turandot was involved in a range of arts and crafts as a child, including theater, singing, music, and sewing:

"Puffy paints came into my world and so I started puffy painting on my shirts and things. Then a couple years later it seemed like maybe I was deft enough to be able to handle a sewing machine [...] Other kids were doing sports and I was in sewing class"

Designing and making clothes captured Turandot's imagination and she was deeply involved at an early age:

"In high school I was making all my own clothes practically and I was sure I was going to be a fashion designer, but [...] it seemed like such an awful world to be in [...] it just had this community that I wasn't excited about."

Opting for balance, Turandot attended Mills College, getting a degree in Media Studies and Spanish. Meanwhile, she stopped designing apparel, finding some creative release in collage, but struggling with her instincts to create clothes:

"It was always kind of sad for me. I'd see other people [sewing and think,] 'Oh, I should be doing that', but I felt like I couldn't because there was this huge mental block for me [...] There's kind of a snobbery towards people doing clothing in the art world [...] It has this reputation for being really artificial. "

After college, Turandot worked in video media and documentary film, but lacked the enthusiasm to go above and beyond. Then, a friend producing a film asked her to work as a stylist:

"It woke something up in me. I was working with a woman who was creating some of the costumes and I [...] just started getting that hunger again"

The film project led to stylist work for commercials and photo shoots, but Turandot still felt unfulfilled:

"It was not very satisfactory because there's no artistic expression - you essentially just have to do what they say"

After some soul searching, Turandot arrived at creating clothing from recycled things, which resolved some of the conflict Turandot felt about the wastefulness of the clothing industry. A visit to an exhibit in New York further inspired her sense of depth in clothing art:

"This woman had done a colonial outfit [...] but all the fabrics were african print [...] That made an impression on me [...] I would like to do more work in that sense [...] because clothing is such a political thing both historically and even now."

Turandot then created the clothing-line Vagadu and created collections based on art by Jean Varda, Rex Flodstrom, and Kara Maria. Going forward, she hopes to collaborate more closely with artists and their works in process:

"I'm always just interested to push it [...] I'm interested too see how much more expressive we can be and make up some interchange with the artist"

Meanwhile, Turandot plans events to show her work either worn by models or "performed" by dancers. Displaying her work with dancers adds a tertiary level of creativity:

"I love collaborating with different artist and I love what they bring with it. Having dancers and having them pretty much freely choose how they go about interpreting [...] it's great because there's my vision, there's their vision, and there's the art itself"

Some could view the functional nature of clothing as limiting, but Turandot embraces it as a medium both for what the wearer can add to the piece and the balance between material and form:

"To have them on the body [...] it really tells much more of the story and it becomes alive. This static piece becomes a living thing [... W]hat's kind of great about clothing [is] you can go crazy with the fabric, but then the form itself has to be kind of defined"

The Arteaser Calendar will keep you posted on any upcoming events featuring Joui Turandot's art. In the meantime, you can follow her on her blog.

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

I met Erika Meriaux during Open Studios in October and the classical civilizations minor in me was intrigued by the mythology themes in many of her paintings. We later met again in her SOMA studio for the Arteaser Project.

Growing up in France, Erika Meriaux always drew as a child and even enrolled in a fine arts school as a teenager. But she left after six months as she was not taking school seriously. That may have been the end of her formal training, but at age nineteen she began painting on her own:

"I started painting when I got a small apartment in Lille [in the] north of France. The walls were white and I felt that I needed to fill the emptiness"

Meriaux took to surrounding herself with images and patterns that she enjoyed:

"My inspirations were very diverse. I liked to work with ornaments or repetitive patterns, like wallpapers or something like that, and I'm still [inspired] by that"

Meanwhile, unemployment plagued France, particularly northern France, making job opportunities hard to come by. Having started a family in her early twenties, Meriaux found herself at home painting. She began asking her husband, who worked for a software company, about transferring to California:

"I had many motivations to go to San Francisco: First, I was living in the north of France and I needed more sun (laughs) [...] and I needed a more dynamic environment for art"

Meriaux and her family moved to the Bay Area in 2000, but much of her influence still comes the Old World. The classical Western paintings that adorn the walls of European museums feature biblical and mythological references:

"I have always been inspired by visiting museums. So, I have often been inspired by classical themed paintings - it's why I'm working on mythology now. It's because it's a tribute to other painters"

While her figurative content draws from a long tradition of European biblical and mythological painting, her stylistic inspiration is in modern figurative painters, such as Balthus, Gustav Klimt, Diego Rivera, and Tamara de Lempicka, as well as 20th century propaganda art:

"In a way that propaganda use in the thirties [...] was based on archetype: very strong people, very strong men or very strong women... the idea of an archetype, a god, someone very powerful "

Harmonizing between actual stories of god, goddesses, and biblical heroes and the psychology of worship is what fascinates Meriaux and inspires her work:

"It's a very interesting thing to what lead millions of people towards something, toward an idea […] This need - the need for someone or something to worship - that is interesting because this has nothing rational. It's deep inside each person, this need of worship"

The anthropomorphic nature of the greek gods – powerfully divine beings often flawed by human vices – cleverly captures that relationship between authority and human nature. Another set of characters that similarly intrigue Meriaux are those from Tarot cards, which she explained to me were originally for gambling:

"What inspires me [about Tarot is...] it's a very popular way of expression. […Gamblers] are very superstitious, so, it's not difficult to imagine all this whole universe of gambling and images [...] When you see Tarot cards, it talks about the time it was, and what people thought at this time and what were their worries"

For Meriaux, these elements of mysticism reflect on the human psyche and need for faith:

"I think the very core of all of this is my interest for [the] human being, because as a person who doesn't believe in god or any kind of supernatural thing, what interests me [is] the need [to] follow something, follow a person."